I think it depends. Part of the alt-right is definitely young guys in college towns, hip frat boy types. but another part are the socially maladjusted ones who who hate Chad-types. I don't think they'd have a great grasp of what's cool either.

It was really weird seeing cringe as a meme go from genuine expressions of empathy, contact or secondhand embarrassment, to just straight up "Laugh at this person."

For a very brief time, doing something "cringeworthy" was nothing to be ashamed of. It was, by very fucking nature of what it was, relatable and understandable. But now it's just another word for "people doing things I don't like."

Nah, this is just good ol' procrastination, or even just being fucking tired.

There are days where the very weight of your responsibilities is enough to take you out. It's just so much stuff, and you can't struggle to muster up even a single, minuscule, lonely fuck to give about it.

Not to mention that procrastination is addictive. You put it off, feel relief, put it off more, feel more relief, and it gets harder and harder to come out of.

But because he believes global warming is a problem, understands that immigration is more complicated than telling foreigners "no," and thinks there are some people who should maybe probably not be allowed to own some guns, so we don't think he's that bad.

Romney supported the hell out of big oil, said he wasn't sure what was causing climate change, and said we should expand military spending. I don't think there's a single hot-topic issue he hasn't 180'd on since the early 2000s though, so who's to say?

But he wasn't consistently, blatantly rewriting last week's events, so we don't think he's that bad.

It can get worse. If it does, we could see shit like, "Trump didn't loudly and consistently advocate internment camps, so we don't think he's that bad."

Keeping things in perspective isn't just about realizing that McCain and Romney would probably have been just fine and respectable as presidents- it's about also remembering how much lower we can drop.

I think this is the core of the problem in most situations, that people believe this. Being inclusive really is an effortful thing.

Everyone has biases that they're not immediately aware of. Everyone treats others in a way that's firmly rooted in those unconscious biases. The only way to overcome them is effort- the same way it takes effort to pull yourself away from leisure and do work, or to not eat donuts while dieting.

Not being racist, sexist, or anything else that might exclude or otherwise negatively affect a group is a matter of consciously choosing to subvert your initial, inborn bias.

Low level party gets contacted by an old and wealthy man with a deep interest in knowledge, both the arcane and the historical. His house is lavish, but messy. He's eccentric, but deeply intelligent; almost unsettlingly so.

All he asks is that the party go into a dungeon, maybe an old temple or a derelict, ancient mage's guild tower, to retrieve an artifact he's been after for a while.

So the party goes in, finding that the threats they encounter are much, much easier than they initially expected. Along the way, maybe they find some disarmed traps and already defeated enemies, all maybe a week gone. They might surmise that the way has already been paved for them, they might not.

They get to the end of the dungeon and see, on a pedestal, ornately displayed and untainted by time's weathering, an artifact. Maybe it's a scroll, maybe it's an amulet, maybe it's a wand. And scattered about the pedestal, a week rotten and dead, are the remains of what one can clearly see was an adventuring party. Appropriate investigation discovers that they all killed each other.

And on the pedestal, written in elegant lettering (maybe common, maybe not), there is a plaque which reads "Wish."

What your level 1 adventuring party chooses to do with this one-charge Wish item in a world that can barely produce healing potions is up to them.

One of the ways the article really struck me is how I was reminded of my time in Alabama.

Senior year of high school, my best friend and I drove from Miami, all through Florida up to see a concert in Alabama. Fuck paying for a hotel or anything though, we'll stay with some of his family. Problem is, the family he had was about an hour away from the city where the concert was happening. His aunt lived in the country.

We spent I think two weeks up there and not once did I ever get over how straight up dead everything felt. I understood everything then. I understood how you still get stories about teens that drove their cars into fences, or kids from alright families that get into meth, or really anything bad that the TV says young people are doing now.

If the rest of rural America is anything like his aunt's town, I get it. Things are oppressively boring. It's genuinely jarring, and I can totally understand how someone grows up in that, on the fringes of things, forgotten by pop culture, and jaded by how the rest of America forgot they existed.

I knew what they meant when they said their way of life was dying, and I didn't care.

I also knew exactly why they believed the things they did, and I didn't care.

"Fix it anyway," I thought. "Have the perception to realize that blacks in the city are no worse than blacks next door. Your religious, small way of life is dying because it ought to, and you should let it happen."

But when he mentioned the increased rates of suicide, the inability to leave, the hopelessness, it all came together. This article was very unexpectedly eye-opening.

I cried, honestly. I've been looking forward to exercising my right since I was a little kid and I was pretty excited about my candidate. Could've done it around my birthday too if it had arrived. sigh